Humanity, nature, and sustainability: How one director captured ‘Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision’

An interview with Nicolas Brown, whose documentary from Prime Video and The King’s Foundation chronicles His Majesty's principals of Harmony.

The documentary shows the impact of His Majesty’s work for the environment, which debuts worldwide today on Amazon’s Prime Video. 

Finding Harmony explores how our well-being and the planet’s health are intertwined, and highlights how we must take action to protect our home. As Brown explains, that first step is easier than you think. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Amazon Sustainability: Why is this film important, and why is it important to tell this story now?

Nicolas Brown: The natural world is in trouble. And this story is a fascinating one, a surprising one. Unless you're very closely following the Royal Family, you probably wouldn't know about how His Majesty has had a lifelong passion for trying to create harmony between the natural world and mankind. And that's a really urgent story. I think many of us have this inkling that we should do better. We could live better and closer to and more harmoniously with nature, which is a simplistic thought, but it has incredible depth, which hopefully the film shows.

Amazon Sustainability: Do you feel hopeful after filming? 

Brown: King Charles chose the environment as a cause to champion since he was young. He had many other things that he could do and needed to do, he's got unbelievable numbers of charities and responsibilities, but he always kept coming back to the environment. 

Amazon Sustainability: You’ve engaged with environmental issues for years. What did you take away from working on this film?

Brown: When you work in the environmental space, biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, and plastics are well-trodden paths. But when we build our urban environments and we don't consider nature, we end up cutting people off from nature. And there is this great Renaissance happening, which I think The King’s Foundation helped promote, to bring nature back into our built environment. It's only recently that we've become disconnected, and we've forgotten how to live closely with nature. There's an example in the film, in India, where you can see someone restoring land using ancient technology that people there had practiced for thousands of years and slightly forgotten. And by honoring knowledge of Indigenous peoples and ancient cultures, we can make something that's rich culturally and design cities and towns to make them fit within nature.

Amazon Sustainability: How does the film help people connect with these ideas?

Brown: As the film’s narrator Kate Winslet says, when you go outside, that's the first step. And it's actually that easy—you start to think about creating harmony between yourself and nature the minute you step outside your door and take a walk in the fresh air and start thinking about how nature can heal you mentally, how it can make you feel better, how it is amazing to see birds or animals or trees. His Majesty’s brilliance is in distilling the idea to something that can be adopted by any of us in any way we see fit. The more you feel that you’re connected to the living systems that support us, the more you feel connected with the community. 

Amazon Sustainability: How do you find harmony?

Brown: Since working on the project, I have become obsessed with Harmony. I'm moving back to the United States part time and my house there has solar power and if I get an electric vehicle, I can charge it through solar, and then suddenly I’m not using up fossil fuels. It's steps like that that make me feel like I'm making some progress. I'm even more energized having met The King, I realize that there are more dimensions to what we can do. I try to live better and I'm always falling short and there's frustration—how can I do something? I'm just a little person. And yet we keep trying, with hope, to make the world a better place.

Watch Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision on Prime Video.

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